“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell what you are.” This quote, made famous by Brillat-Savarin in his seminal essay about gastronomy, summarizes the central role that food has played in the history of mankind. Food catalyzes reunion, celebration, and social identification. Conversely...

The breakage-fusion-bridge cycle is a classical mechanism of telomere-driven genome instability in which dysfunctional telomeres are fused to other chromosomal extremities, creating dicentric chromosomes that eventually break at mitosis. Here, we uncover a distinct pathway of telomere-...

Although AgRP and POMC neurons in the hypothalamus have long been associated with regulation of food intake, in this issue of Cell, Chen et al. use direct imaging in vivo to demonstrate rapid changes in their activity upon food presentation. The rapidity of their altered responses chal...

Hunger is controlled by specialized neural circuits that translate homeostatic needs into motivated behaviors. These circuits are under chronic control by circulating signals of nutritional state, but their rapid dynamics on the timescale of behavior remain unknown. Here, we report opt...

The breakage-fusion-bridge cycle is a classical mechanism of telomere-driven genome instability in which dysfunctional telomeres are fused to other chromosomal extremities, creating dicentric chromosomes that eventually break at mitosis. Here, we uncover a distinct pathway of telomere-...

The quest to slow aging has come far, and what used to be the domain of science fiction writers and snake oil salesmen may soon become science fact. Innovative new approaches, such as the use of the very short-lived African killifish (Harel et al.), are bridging the translational gap a...

Aging is a complex process that affects multiple organs. Modeling aging and age-related diseases in the lab is challenging because classical vertebrate models have relatively long lifespans. Here, we develop the first platform for rapid exploration of age-dependent traits and diseases ...

HIV latency is the chief obstacle to eradicating HIV but is widely believed to be an evolutionary accident providing no lentiviral fitness advantage. However, findings of latency being “hardwired” into HIV’s gene-regulatory circuitry appear inconsistent with latency being an evolutiona...

DNA recombinases face the daunting task of locating and pairing up specific sequences among millions of base pairs in a genome, all within about an hour. Qi et al. show that recombinases solve this problem by searching in 8-nt microhomology units, reducing the search space and accelera...